Just after noon on Saturday, the police said, an officer in a patrol car approached Mr. Brown and another man. As the officer began to leave his vehicle, one of the men pushed the officer back into the car and "physically assaulted" him, according to the police department's account. A struggle occurred "over the officer's weapon," and at least one shot was fired inside the car, Chief Belmar said. The two left the car, and the officer shot Mr. Brown about 35 feet away from the vehicle, the police reported. Several shots were fired from the officer's weapon.

And that particular part of the story makes approximately no sense to boot, so the best I can manage is to think that a very paranoid, twitchy (cough-racist-cough) cop tried to throw his weight around by forcing him into the car and panicked when Brown tried to get away.

Johnson said the first time the officer fired, he and Brown got scared and ran away.

"He shot again, and once my friend felt that shot, he turned around and put his hands in the air, and he started to get down," Johnson said. "But the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and fired several more shots."

The witness in 10, where that looks like it comes from, seems pretty coherent. Here's a quick transcript of him talking about that part specifically:

So as he was running the officer was trying to get out of the car and once he got out of the car he pursued my friend but his weapon was drawn.

Now he didn't see any weapon drawn at him or anything like that us going for no weapon. His weapon was already drawn when he got out of the car.

He shot again and once my friend felt that shot he turned around and he put his hands in the air, and he started to get down, but the officer still approached with his weapon drawn and he fired several more shots.

And my friend died.

He didn't say anything to him, he just stood over him shooting. By then I was so afraid for my life I just I got up and ran.

One of the things that is really bothering me are the police department press statements that it happened X way. No. The officer involved reported that it happened X way. Eyewitness accounts are to the contrary. If you want to take the position that we don't know what happened, that seems fair enough. But if you are the police and you are already picking sides before you could possibly have done any, much less a complete, investigation, then the only message you are communicating at your little presser is that you are going to protect your own.

People's friends and families do tend to think well of them, yes. That doesn't make them unreliable. And the various eyewitnesses seem to be telling basically consistent stories. Not all of them are Brown's friend.

Look, there's very good reason to think the police officer involved is giving unreliable testimony (such as, he murdered an unarmed kid), and little to no reason to think any of the other eyewitnesses are here unless "conflicts with what a police officer says happened" counts. (And it doesn't.)

How often do unarmed young black men grab for an officer's pistol without getting shot to death? Also, how often does anyone except a young black man grab for an officer's pistol and get shot to death? Doesn't it seem just the tiniest bit suspicious that virtually every young black man who gets shot by cops nowadays was going for the officer's pistol? 10 or 15 years ago, they were always pulling something shiny out of their pocket and brandishing it, but now the supply of shiny objects seems to have been somewhat curtailed, so they have to reach for the officer's pistol instead. We're back in dsquared's Law territory here -- when it is obvious that someone, or some group, has lied over and over and over again, a rational observer is not obliged to extend the benefit of the doubt.

So let's go back to the official PBA version of events:
1. A police officer sees three young black men
2. The officer stops his vehicle and gets out to confront them
3. Michael Brown physically assaults the officer
4. The officer places Brown in the vehicle
5. Brown grabs for the officer's weapon, and a shot is fired inside the vehicle
6. Brown exits the vehicle
7. The officer shoots Brown several times

That's about the most cockamamie, ridiculous line of bullshit I've ever heard in my life. What probable cause did the officer have to stop these men? What did he say to them? Why did Brown initially assault the officer? What were his friends doing while this was happening? How did the officer place an uncooperative Brown in his vehicle? How did Brown manage to grab for the weapon while inside the vehicle? How was the shot fired inside the vehicle, exactly? What was Brown doing after exiting the vehicle that justified lethal force? No part of the police version of events hangs together for even a moment.

Patented Natilo Paennim™ Miscarriage of Justice Prediction: Police investigation will exonerate officer. FBI investigation will lead to an indictment. Venue will be switched to all-white suburb. Prosecution will be mishandled. Defense will concoct a bizarre theory involving Brown being some kind of hyper-fast contortionist. Jury will believe it. Acquittal. Riots. Hand-wringing. Same thing will happen two states over the next week, but nobody (white) will pay any attention.

The difference between the police story in this case and the eyewitness stories is just straightforward plausibility. While it's a very small minority of police who do that kind of thing, caveat caveat caveat, police shooting an unarmed man because he's non-compliant is the kind of thing that does happen. It's not an implausible story.

A man who (as far as I've heard so far -- if I'm missing something someone should point it out) wasn't out-of-control drunk, or high, or in the midst of a psychotic break, or trying to escape arrest for some immediately prior violent crime making a grab for a cop's gun and trying to shoot the cop with it? That is implausible. Not impossible, but there's no explanation for why Brown would have done that.

Mostly, people don't engage in sudden, unexplained murderous attacks on each other. A story that relies on something like that happening is going to need a lot of evidence in its favor before I believe it.

Plus, even by the police story, he shot a guy in back who was 35 feet away and leaving. Apparently, that's legal in some circumstances (I looked it up on Wikipedia), but it isn't the sort of thing that's going to get people to give your judgement the benefit of the doubt.

I should add to 33 the word 'unarmed'. It's not that no one unarmed is ever going to violently attack an armed police officer. I'm sure it happens all the time. But I have to believe that when it happens, it's overwhelmingly likely to be someone who's drunk, high, psychotic, or actively trying to evade arrest for an immediate serious crime.

To me the most striking thing was how many of these veteran officers report having a conversion experience, when their investigations suggested to them that a suspect might be innocent, let alone that there might be police misconduct involved.

Isn't that odd? The idea of police misconduct is very widespread in the folkways of this country, and is a theme in countless movies and tv shows. Had these cops, and by extension many, many others convinced themselves that the reality of unjust accusation, of police misconduct was a complete fantasy, vanishingly rare if not nonexistent?

It would have seemed to me that one could and probably would think that the folkways were wrong or misleading in how much misconduct they suggested occurred, without denying to yourself that it did occur, and perhaps altogether too often. That would have been my notion of the sane cop's sense of things.

I wouldn't have thought the more extreme position could be so widespread.

I agree. The hopelessly utopian solution that came to mind is that it would be a good idea to rotate serving police officers through the public defender's office for six months (say) at a time, perhaps as a prerequisite for promotion above a certain rank, in order to broaden their minds and give them a more realistic idea of how their colleagues could go wrong.

The idea of police misconduct is very widespread in the folkways of this country, and is a theme in countless movies and tv shows. Had these cops, and by extension many, many others convinced themselves that the reality of unjust accusation, of police misconduct was a complete fantasy, vanishingly rare if not nonexistent?

This is fairly explicable - you feel sympathetic to the people you know, and are reluctant to believe bad things about them. We all know that all sorts of things are very widespread, not just in TV shows but in reality, but we still wouldn't believe them readily about people we like, absent pretty good evidence.

I'm pretty sure the answer here is "yes", or at least that it comes very close enough to that to make very little practical difference. Certainly defending people you know is a large part of it, but in my experience it goes beyond specific individuals to cover pretty much all police officers, no matter how professional.* It's understandable since police officers spend a lot of time around people who have, let's say, negative views of police activities. And similarly a lot of time around people who instinctively deny things they're openly and transparently doing, so developing a "the not-a-police-officer is just a liar" reflex is a very human response.

Of course it's exactly the sort of response that makes people of certain political persuasions think that the "there are corrupt/brutal/bad police officers, but the majority of cops are solidly decent public servants doing hard jobs as fairly as they can" line should have "..while covering for the bad ones" appended to it.

*Consider, ahem, this comment thread where an entirely reasonable and, barring a remarkable talent for making up stories, upstanding police officer appears to be taking a very questionable story from a different (much more questionable) police officer to be far more credible than the entirely plausible story being told by multiple civilian witnesses...

There's also the fact that most police officers aren't committing misconduct the vast majority of the time; the intolerable amount of police misconduct we're talking about, that makes people like me systematically believe witness stories in a case like this over the police version, is 0.0002% (don't hold me to an order of magnitude here) of police-officer hours. That's different for different varieties of misconduct, of course -- things like abusive stop-and-frisking is much more common, but much less intense in terms of misconduct. And even the small amount of shooting/strangling unarmed people they do is intolerably much.

But from a decent police officer's point of view, he spends all day, every day, interacting with people who are behaving in violent/otherwise socially unacceptable ways. One of his standard interactions with the public is with someone who is completely in the wrong with regard to everything about the interaction, and the cop is just trying to resolve things without anything bad happening. If that's your daily worklife, as it honestly is for most police officers, it's got to be hard to look at any story with a cop in it and not have a strong prior assumption that the police officer's actions were justified and everyone else was a criminal or otherwise a violent lunatic.

40: Yeah, but there are numerous studies showing eyewitness accounts from "multiple civilian witnesses" tend to be full of errors and omissions.

Bottom line, unless this cop has a record of being a hyper-aggressive menace, I'm going to believe him. It's the flip-side of the Zimmerman psyche, where it was clear he was looking to shoot someone and finally found a target.

I seem to have gotten onto heavy rotation on the list for jury duty at the criminal court, and it has been rather striking that in the voir dire the prosecutors spend a LOT of time trying to ferret out biases against police testimony based not just on background assumptions but also on many different factual scenarios. Such as, if an officer admits to having really seriously screwed up some part of the investigation would you therefore not believe anything else he/she testified to? or, if an officer lied to the defendant in order to provoke a confession, would that make you biased against him/her? Obviously, weird, small sample, but none the interesting as these are the cases the prosecution us bringing to trial and presumably thinks are solid.

The way the prosecutor led up to that one was interesting to me, she analogized to telling your child a lie in order to extract a confession along the lines of "we all do it, right?" And I thought hard and carefully - nope, never done it, and would think it a huge betrayal to do it.

47. Ironically that's the sort of question where people tend to think they'd react one way ("wow, his credibility isn't as high as it was before I knew he did that") but often react the other way ("well, if he's willing to admit to that he must be a pretty honest guy").

The reason I think the automatic default to taking a police officer's word in these sorts of case is worrying, actually, is that by the time a case gets to the "neighborhood erupts in anger making national news" stage the likelihood that there really was something going wrong is a lot greater than it would be for most cases where people accuse police officers of something like this. That's not to say that there aren't available examples of exactly this happening in cases where the police officer was in the right but it does tend to tilt the scales in favor of something going wrong. One of the reasons for this, I think, is that people do generally default to taking authority figures to be trustworthy and to get a lot of people really het up about potential misconduct requires either (1) a really good reason to think it happened or (2) a serious tension between the community and the police force, which is certainly true here. And the second counts as a subset of the first one.

Well, in the first example the prosecutor said he was going to take a month to try one count of gun possession with a gang multiplier, which seemed like an awful long trial for the charge. He got M out of that box on his 3rd or 4th peremptory, and once I was excused I poked around in the local news and turns out the defendant was suspected of several murders. My conclusion was the police had seriously screwed up the investigation, he had huge proof problems and didn't want a lawyer on the jury.

The second situation was horribly sad and I was so relieved not to have to serve.

I seem to have gotten onto heavy rotation on the list for jury duty at the criminal court, and it has been rather striking that in the voir dire the prosecutors spend a LOT of time trying to ferret out biases against police testimony based not just on background assumptions but also on many different factual scenarios.

This is actually diametrically opposed to my recent experience in voir dire. The prosecutor there was at pains to ferret out any bias *for* police testimony (particularly relevant in that case because the charges were interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty, plus an assault charge for one of the defendants).

Yeah, but there are numerous studies showing eyewitness accounts from anybody, including absolutely cops tend to be full of errors and omissions.

Very true. See the (unscientific) study I carried out myself; class of 30 or so students, I'd just finished teaching them how to describe a person correctly (age, build, clothing, distinguishing marks etc, only give what you're sure of, if you're not sure then say "possible" or "probable") and another instructor came into the room by prearrangement, chatted with me for about 30 seconds and then left. Then I told them: "OK, your test on this material starts now. Question one: write down a description of that guy who was just talking to me."
Ideal conditions: the students were rested, they weren't under stress, the subject was standing about 10-20 feet away from them in a brightly lit room for a significant time, and they were asked to describe him not more than a minute after he walked out the door. Probably more like 15-20 seconds.

Did they get it right? Did they hell. They got the clothes wrong - he was in jeans and a polo shirt, and they thought he was in everything from shorts to uniform; he was 5 foot eight, or maybe six foot; he was slim, medium build, heavy, balding, wearing glasses, 25 years old, 45 years old, carrying a bag, a folder, a pizza box, a newspaper. One student handed in a sheet of paper entirely blank except for the single word "BLACK". (Which the subject was; but, as he pointed out between helpless giggles, "there's more than one of us out there you know".)

Interesting point: the women were way better at this than the men, especially at getting the clothing right.

I agree with 41. To 47, worth noting that those are different kinds of "misconduct" -- I think most cops would agree that they have brethren who seriously screw up investigations sometimes, and for better or for worse lying to provoke a confession is generally just fine. Killing a citizen without a remotely reasonable basis (and I agree without knowing anything that it seems plausible that this is what happened here) is a totally different thing.

Another thing to remember is that criminals lie, all the time, especially to the police. One of the core cop skills is seeing through bullshit, especially bullshit directed at them. This very quickly produces certain habits of mind.

I guess I should also say that my belief (not based on any real non-anecdotal knowledge) is that cops fairly frequently "lawyer lie" (that is, they don't affirmatively make a false statement, but omit things or shade language in a misleading way) and occasionally but much less often lie lie. When they do so, however, it's usually in the service of avoiding a bureaucratic hassle or to make slightly easier the prosecution of someone whom they have reason to think guilty, not to cover up sadism or brutality. Not that lying to protect the last never happens, of course, but it's definitely at the "this is serious bad career ending shit" level, at least in most departments.

When they do so, however, it's usually in the service of avoiding a bureaucratic hassle or to make slightly easier the prosecution of someone whom they have reason to think guilty, not to cover up sadism or brutality.

But, should the latter happen -- which it very rarely does, I'm sure, so it's not like you're prepared with how you're going to approach it! -- you use the tools in your toolbox.

While this response is easy to understand, in the situation, it probably was not a good idea from the perspective of community relations of, um, not looking like people trying to get away with murdering some kid.

All of those studies about how unreliable eyewitness memory is -- people believe their memories are reliable and accurate, but in practice they're astonishingly bad -- fascinate me, because my subjective sense of my own memory is that it's just about as bad as people's memories generally turn out to be. That is, I wouldn't have described the guy accurately, but I would have been completely unsurprised by being totally wrong. And I would love to know if I'm just astonishingly self-aware about my level of reliability, or if my memory is even worse than the already terrible norm.

One thing I will say is that, aside from psych professors, cops are probably the people in the world most aware of the problems with eyewitness testimony, because they deal with its flaws and problems and errors all the time. Doesn't mean they don't make mistakes themselves but standard cop training and cop experience deals a lot with this issue.

65: I like to think I'm fairly observant, but perhaps not as much as I'd like. A couple of years ago, I had a student/trainee I'd been working with for a couple of months when my boss and I ran into his old boss at a conference. My boss had waved me over ask whether I'd noticed my trainee was missing a leg. Actually, I hadn't. His prosthesis was quite good (thick enough that his pant leg could hang normally), no limp, walked with even strides, and he was required to wear long pants and closed-toe shoes for safety reasons. My boss gave me no end of shit over it - "Call yourself a scientist, huh?"

66 - True, but that doesn't necessarily make them immune to the assumption that their own memory is straightforwardly reliable in situations, or at least situations where you think you ought to have known what happened.

A lot of the people I've met who know a lot about cognitive biases/etc. also seem to believe that knowing they're there makes you immune to them, which, obviously, it doesn't because cognitive biases are precisely things where you don't react the right way to reasons. I suspect that that's a cognitive blind spot in its own right (and my favorite one, if so).

Also, ajay, I'm guessing the results were more dramatic than they would have been in a lot of cases since "professor wraps up lecture and then turns to talk to someone I don't know" is exactly the sort of situation where I would immediately tune out/focus on something else/continue checking facebook on my smartphone/etc. In the interests of Science! you should repeat the experiment only have the confederate shoot you several times before running out.

"take out... (gasp).. take out a sheet of paper. I want... you to write down... a description of.. oh god oh god the blood.. a description of that man...I feel cold..cold all over...you will be graded on this assignment.."

Apparently the town of Ferguson is 67% black and 3 of the 53 cops are black. Why does this happen?

Just last week, I was in a conversation with a group of mothers of black children, the rest of whom were white, where the moms were all hoping none of their children would grow up to be cops. The army if you have to, sure, fire department is fine, but they felt there was just too much history of misbehavior and it wasn't a safe place to be black.

I was on the committee hiring teachers for the girls' school and only one candidate out of maybe 30 did not visibly present as white and we didn't hire that person. Things would be so much better if we had teachers who looked like the students and shared their backgrounds, but we're not having any luck with that. Didn't hire any more male teachers, either, even though we're trying to do that too. The candidates have to be present and willing (and I suspect that outreach to candidates has to go better and I'm hoping to make some connections at the local education programs to see if there's more we can do) and that's just not happening even though there's a need.

76: A thought: can you be sure jobs postings looking for new (as opposed to senior) teachers get circulated to HCBUs? Not sure whether they'd share backgrounds, but it's a different pool than State U. I suspect most departments have mailing lists for job seekers. (This is something I've been thinking about, too - how to reach a pool of underrepresented applicants for a particular position. If anyone has brilliant ideas, I'm all ears, but I'm looking at a pipeline problem to a large extent.)

80: Don't a large portion of the HCBUs have a history of being normal schools at some point, and so might have larger than the usual education programs? Your idea, if it isn't already applied, seems like an obvious win-win.

80: I've thought about that, but the two nearest are a 90-minute drive. We have hired a few people from more than an hour away, mostly Appalachian areas, but I don't know what schools the principal was sending to. I'll be actively involved in hiring the new principal and so asking how this is going to be addressed will be part of the screening process. It's just depressing. (And, really, "Come work for what is on paper the worst district in the state and get paid less than you would at another school!" is a tough selling point to anyone.)

And we actually do really well in terms of hiring people who've come to teaching from non-traditional channels and who have themselves experienced poverty at various points in their lives. Just white ones.

Our local police union mainly seems interested in removing or having a court remove the requirement that they live in the city. Somehow I don't think doing so will help make a police force that is more like the people being policed.

83: We've reached out to them for other service projects within the school and had good results, though probably only because Lee and I insisted on it. I know it's a building process. It's just not going to be a priority unless someone makes it one, and so it seems like I'll have to do that.

82: Maybe there are folks who left your area for school and would like to return. At any rate, just making a connection to someone who could add your listing (departmental secretary is likely) might shift your applicant pool slightly.

That was me too. I actually felt kind of good about it, as providing an excuse for me not to remember people (even people I like quite a lot! I gave Smearcase a blank stare on the A-train once -- no idea at all who he was until he said something. Voices, I recognize.)

Every so often (a few times a week, really) I am reminded of why it makes such a difference that Obama is in the White House and not a Republican - any Republican. Does anyone believe that the John Ashcroft justice department would be swooping in to investigate the Ferguson police department? Maybe they would, if loud nationwide protests made inaction untenable. But just to uphold racial justice? Not in a million years.

100: I regularly spend time with people who can't differentiate between Hillary Clinton and the generic Republican nominee. She's far from my first choice but I can't see a Republican getting past the dual filters of the Tea Party and the Neocons who wouldn't be vastly worse. I can't stand Hillary but the alternative seems so much worse that I can't imagine voting for anyone else if it comes to that.

can't differentiate between Hillary Clinton and the generic Republican nominee

I have trouble differentiating Hillary Clinton from Joe Lieberman.

I can't stand Hillary but the alternative seems so much worse that I can't imagine voting for anyone else if it comes to that.

Yeah, this. Honestly, in a matchup between HRC and Rand Paul, it's about 50/50 on the issues. But the next president will shape the courts for decades, and most of those issues are the ones that go to Clinton. So she wins my vote by default, but I think she's going to make a terrible president.

Is there any more accurate prediction of the future than 105? I guess a nuclear bomb could prevent it.

I personally think that the belief that HRC is materially worse (or, for that matter, better) than Obama on any issue, including foreign policy, is crazytown. Also I find 103 last affirmatively disgusting and I will respond to any hint -- any hint -- of Rand Paul support or accommodationism by unleashing the fucking fury. Just want to stake out that position early.

120: Halford, while you and I don't get along, I believe I have staked out that position. In much, much milder terms, of course. I do want to hear from apo or whomever else just what Rand Paul supposedly offers: I swear I won't unleash the fury in Halfordian terms.

That is, ending the War for the Greater Middle East is a big fucking deal that affects everything else the federal government does thanks to the enormous amount of money it's swallowed and continues to swallow.

a big fucking deal that affects everything else the federal government does thanks to the enormous amount of money it's swallowed and continues to swallow

Obviously, I agree.* But even after he saves gazillions of dollars with his isolationist policies (that he would abandon the minute he's inaugurated), President Paul would surely starve those parts of the federal apparatus that you (we?) care about the most, because he would cut taxes and offer corporate kickbacks that would make W blush. Which is why I honestly can't fathom how you can make a statement like the one you made above.

Then again, I don't really care, because there's just no chance at all that you or anyone who shares your views will vote for Rand Paul or, really, anyone but whichever war-mongering shithead the Democrats run.

Clinton could be really good on domestic issues though, like Johnson was. Also, at least she's honest about being a hawkish conservative who loves Israel and has no use for DFHs or union members. Can't say that about the Big O.

Oh, I know that. I was thinking more of the nonsense one sometimes hears about a left-libertarian alliance. And then you got me all worked up with, "Honestly, in a matchup between HRC and Rand Paul, it's about 50/50 on the issues."

I am willing to bet $20 that by January 2016, Rand Paul, if still running for the Republican nomination, will be fully supporting aid to Israel. Probably also will at least sound more like a hawk, but that's harder to quantify.

On the Rand Paul thing earlier in the thread - I can't be the only person who remembers the last time you guys elected a Republican president who swore up and down that he was opposed to military mucking-around in other people's countries?

I can't be the only person who remembers the last time you guys elected a Republican president who swore up and down that he was opposed to military mucking-around in other people's countries?

No, me too! I recall an email exchange I had with [famous liberal blogger] in which I conjectured and he concurred that the appointment of Colin Powell as Secretary of State augured excessive reluctance by the new Administration to use military force.

157.2 is a reminder of how weird and beligerent the late 90s mainstream Democrat foreign policy world was, which I think also helps explain why there's not much reason to expect that HRC's foreign policy would be materially more (or less) belligerent than Obama's.

The libertarians are all such morons, and don't think you're going to escape Monster Island, "bleeding hearts."

Was late 90s mainstream Democrat foreign policy noticeably less belligerent than Democratic foreign policy at any previous time? Carter tried to rescue the hostages in a military operation; JFK and LBJ had Vietnam; Truman had Korea.

I'd say the late 90s were a high water mark for post-Cold War, maybe post-Vietnam belligerence from mainstream Democrats (Madeline Albright - "what's the point of having this world class army if we can't use it") but you're right of course that the party has been aggressively internationalist and war-willing since at least Wilson.

151: Rand Paul is also backpedalling on Iraq. Given all this backpedalling and reconsideration and on-second-thoughtfulness, I'll strike his faux foreign policy isolationism off the column for him, and he's left with resistance to NSA spying and the war on drugs. Which is good but doesn't call for a libertarian. Plenty of mainstream Democrats also resist those things.

(I think I'm done now regarding Rand Paul; I just remain a bit mystified that some liberals -- though I know Apo doesn't call himself a liberal -- find Paulism worth anything at all.)

169: Okay. Point taken. The Republican Party can become more libertarian if it wants to. I believe it already has. The parts of its libertarian sensibility that are just too far beyond the pale can be backpedalled out the ass. Like Rand Paul on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. His answer to many troubling questions along these lines is: hand it over to the states! Federalism forevah! That's little different from the cast of the Republican Party in general in recent decades.

172: Yes. There is no plausible scenario where I would vote for Rand Paul. I only pulled his name out of the hat because he has some slightly different rhetoric than the rest of the GOP field. My comment was about Clinton, not Paul.

*However*, I'm hard pressed to name many Democrats whose foreign policy philosophies are worse than HRC's, and the entire Robert Rubin economic wing of the Democratic Party (which includes both HRC and Obama) deserves multiple kicks in the crotch.

Then once she's the nominee, that will become the leftmost fringe of acceptable political discourse. It's such a frustrating and depressing scenario and yet here we go again, lining up to kick that football Charlie Brown-style.

I have no idea what you're talking about. At least your mouth doesn't literally foam.

I still am baffled by the idea that there's a significant foreign policy gap between Hillary and say Obama (or, really any mainstream Democrat). Not that this is dispositive, but she was his Secretary of State (and an unusually powerful one).

baffled by the idea that there's a significant foreign policy gap between Hillary and say Obama (or, really any mainstream Democrat).

I'm not baffled by the idea: some is coming from the recent (misleading) reporting on Clinton's ""Don't do stupid shit" is not a foreign policy" remark.

Clinton's rhetoric is more hawkish; Obama's is more, mrm, not dovish exactly, but more with the emphasis on diplomacy. I couldn't tell you why Clinton is emphasizing the hawkish language: is it really necessary given the disposition of the American public at the moment? And I must say that her remarks about American exceptionalism on the Jon Stewart show were just weird.

"The failure to help build up a credible fighting force of the people who were the originators of the protests against Assad - there were Islamists, there were secularists, there was everything in the middle - the failure to do that left a big vacuum, which the jihadists have now filled."

Sure, because nothing keeps down transnational jihadism like helping to overthrow a government and create a power vacuum. Look, I know she has to find some way to distinguish herself from Obama in front of a campaign, but this is where she's going to start? It's fucking stupid and, unfortunately, it the same fucking stupid she has espoused all along.

or, really any mainstream Democrat

If you define "mainstream" as holding the same FP philosophy as Hillary Clinton, then I guess you have a point. But, for example, 21 of 50 Democratic senators voted against the Iraq AUMF in 2002.

175.last is very puzzling. As apo notes, Hillary has been up-front about Obama having resisted her advice to intervene in Syria.

I was an Obama voter, but a Hillary sympathizer in 2008, because I didn't find either candidate's AUMF position as being indicative of how they'd actually govern.

However, I thought it would be a good idea for the voters to deep-six an AUMF-supporting candidate pour encourager les autres.

Turns out, les autres is apparently Hilllary herself, and it didn't do a damn thing to encourager her. One can only hope that something intervenes to render military interventionism politically toxic, but if the Iraq War itself didn't do that, I can't imagine what will.

In 2014, HRC is the 800-pound gorilla of political fundraising. I have trouble imagining anybody beating her for the nomination (but it seemed that way 8 years ago as well, so) or even mounting anything more than a Sanders- or Kucinich-style symbolic challenge. I also have trouble imagining any of the current GOP hopefuls beating her in a general election.

Obama didn't have to browbeat her. She was his advisor, not vice versa. I, of course, think not getting involved in Syria has been the smartest FP decision of the Obama presidency.

183: or even mounting anything more than a Sanders- or Kucinich-style symbolic challenge.

Or a Warren-style challenge. We've been around this block before. This is discussed at length at DKos and elsewhere. It's extremely annoying that the Clinton gorilla is sucking all the air out of the room, but again, we've been here before. The question is whether it can be changed.

Barring something completely unforeseeable (which isn't to say I think it's impossible, lots of stuff is unforeseeable two years out, I'm just saying we can't plan on anything else), Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee in 2016. If we're lucky, she'll win the general, and before then Obama and Reid will force through some reforms making it easier to get appointments through. By 2020 or 2024 Texas will be purple, Florida will be reliably blue, and enough Tea Partiers will have died off to have a more or less sane Republican Party.

If we're unlucky, in 2016 she'll lose the general, the conventional wisdom will blame it on Clinton being too liberal, and we'll have the 2000s all over again but from a worse starting point.

Biden. I'd go for Biden. He's not stupid. He's overshadowed by Clinton, and she's a bit of a bitch for doing that.

As someone who's fond of Biden, both real-world Biden and Onion Joe, and doesn't think much of HRC, may I say WTF, parsimon? What a surprisingly misogynistic, and confused about how much of a chance VPs generally have of doing anything interesting, thing to say.

I'm getting really tired of my cell phone ringing six or seven times a day with either no caller ID or numbers that Google tells me are associated with democratic fundraising. I guess maybe I should try answering it once and telling them to stop bothering me.

He's overshadowed by Clinton, and she's a bit of a bitch for doing that.

Surely this isn't how you meant that to come out. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to edit it to make any decent sense out of it.

As an aside, I don't think you can non-ironically call women bitches any more. A few months ago, I had occasion to discuss an awful woman I know, with a person who knows how awful she is. I called her a bitch. The sound of it really clanged. I won't do it again.

But, see, this is why I'm probably going to have to pull the lever for Clinton. My wife thinks that a lot of liberal hostility toward Hillary is straightforwardly misogynist, and of course she has plenty of evidence for that view.

The Missus grudgingly permitted me to vote for Obama in '08, and I'm trying to soften her up for the idea that I'd vote for Warren this time. But to date, Hillary has chosen her enemies well, and whatever else she is, she is the enemy of my enemies.

193 I think blaming misogyny is too convenient by half, because the same people are complaining about Obama on the same grounds: too deferential (Obama) or a source (Clinton) of the current Washington consensus. Clinton isn't showing any signs of understanding how much things have changed since 1995.

I'm going to vote for her, but I wish she'd get with the times a bit.

No one is going to deny her this nomination, and time spent speculating or wishing for a challenge is (a) wasted and (b) of no positive value. Instead, we should maybe spend that exact time and energy criticizing the Republicans. Who are worse in every conceivable way, as we've all agreed.

I've come to the same conclusion as Charley. I've never liked her, but I'm for both giving her some space, not being all over her about things like the recent interview, and especially hitting back and complaining about the press's self-admitted propensity to "cover her hard," about stupid stuff like speaking fees and the foundation.

I worked the phone bank for Obama during the early primaries, using my laptop to tell voters who called in from say Ohio where their polling place was; the wonders of the internet. I was a legal observer when the campaign came to Indiana, and we expected the possibility of some challenges from regulars supporting Hillary, which never materialized.

So Hillary was our opponent, then. But I have to say, I thought she got stronger and was a better campaigner as the campaign went on. No, she never recovered from the initial stumbles, but by summer I liked her more than I ever had.

I'm really always out of touch on this stuff, so this is a genuine question. Last time, as far as I remember, Hillary was an unstoppable juggernaut. Is there something different that makes her really unstoppable this time? The additional experience as Sec. of State? Really no competition lined up (I don't think I knew who Obama was in '06, but I'm really always out of touch.)?

198 -- Edwards was a formidable opponent early on, so it was always going to be a race, and Obama really was sui generis coming along and beating her like that. One has to expect that she and her team are making sure nothing like that ever happens again. And, more positively, one assumes she'll have her people read the rule books about how delegates are chosen etc this time.

Hillary was quite unpopular in 2007 in a way that she is not today. Being Secretary of State gave her a sustained bump in the polls.

That poll series measures "favorability," but it doesn't convey how deeply despised she was by the people who didn't rate her favorably. My recollection is that there were periods when something close to half of Americans said they wouldn't vote for her for president under any circumstances.

Furthermore, as Charley points out, she might have learned to count delegates in the interim.

My hunch: We hate women a bit less than we used to; Hillary has compiled a respectable record in a highly visible, responsible role; and Obama's presidency opened Americans up to the possibility that old white guys are not the only folks fit for the presidency.

But she does seem prone to political stupidity. I can't help but summarize her recent foreign policy statement as "Do Stupid Shit." And on this occasion, at least, I'm not sure Americans are prepared to get behind stupid shit.

191: VPs of two-term presidents do generally get the nomination (with the caveat that N is very small (4? 5 if you count Humphrey?) in the modern era). Cheney aside (I kind of doubt that he bowed out for fear of being trounced by McCain; he just wasn't interested), you could argue that it's Biden's "turn," for what that's worth.

198: Clinton was heavily favored in '08 but there were plenty of plausible candidates (including Biden, Edwards, Bayh, etc). Who except Biden is even thinking about running this time?

(None of the above should be taken to endorse applying the b-word to Clinton, which was foolish.)

I love me some Elizabeth Warren as much as the next tax-and-spend liberal, but I caution you folks not to impute the dovish tendencies to her that some of you seem to be imputing. AFAIK she has been mostly silent on foreign policy issues, and if she were ever elected president, she would be surrounded by the same foreign policy hands, more or less, that would serve in a Clinton administration. I would conjecture that she would feel under more pressure than Hillary to show "toughness", as the first woman president and a Massachusetts pinko to boot.

On Iran specifically, even if she had the right instincts, the institutional pressures (from Congress, friends of AIPAC, and the permanent foreign policy bureaucracy) would severely limit her flexibility to affect a rapprochement.

191, 193: I don't think you can non-ironically call women bitches any more. A few months ago, I had occasion to discuss an awful woman I know, with a person who knows how awful she is. I called her a bitch. The sound of it really clanged. I won't do it again.

Sorry. Mayhap I should have said "asshole" or "jerk" or some such. I really don't think my annoyance with Clinton is misogynistic, but if "bitch" is a troublesome term insofar as it's gendered, I won't use it again. What I meant, in any case, is that Clinton is sucking the air out of the room without even declaring her candidacy as yet, while pretending that she's merely on a book tour, nothing more. I feel that she should declare, or firmly decline, but this prevarication on her part is getting in the way of other potential candidates raising money and so on. It's hobbling the rest of the Democratic field, and it's obnoxious. I'd say the same if she were male.

218: That's a bare thread to hang an argument on. She obviously running, even if she's not yet prepared to admit it. If the party wasn't fully convinced she was running, we'd be seeing other plausible candidates jockeying to be next in line. If she doesn't run, after quietly collecting endorsements and elbowing everybody else out of the way, that would be a real a-hole move, and potentially throw the election to the Rs.

Right, that's idiotic. If she (without some good reason) didn't run now, then other potential candidates would have a reasonable basis for a grudge. But she (apparently) is running, and just hasn't formally announced yet, which is perfectly conventional. She's overshadowing other potential candidates by being a formidable opponent, not by doing anything improper.

And calling her a bitch or any non-gendered version thereof for overshadowing Biden particularly is really nuts. He's the VP. Traditionally, anyone in that role can be overshadowed by dust. See, e.g. Whatever Became of Hubert?, Lehrer, T.

220: To recapitulate 214 a bit, I think you're exaggerating, particularly as regards presidential nominations. Barring Cheney, you have to go back to 1920 for a second-term VP who didn't get nominated. It's got to be quite a kick in the gendered balls for Biden to have the country look him over and say, meh.

I thought it was understood from the beginning--from once he accepted the nomination to be VP candidate--that this would be the highest he'd go, he'd retire when he was done, and he had graduated to elder statesman status (I want to add "with dignity" although that doesn't seem quite right...let's go with "with gravitas"). He's older than Reagan was in 1980 (although not as old as McCain).

221: Not that as a VP (without consideration of his age and so on), he'd be an implausible candidate. But thinking it's at all surprising that anyone in a position to speak and act freely (like HRC) is able to be more interesting than a VP is weird -- they have so little scope to do or say anything. They're likely candidates because they have access to the incumbent's machine, usually, not because being a VP is a good way to look good.

You don't have to be an asshole to overshadow a VP, you just have to be active.

And 222 was my impression. I'm very fond of the guy, but I didn't think his selection as VP was in any way expected to groom him for the presidency. (I will always love him for getting confused, or impatient, or whatever happened, and forgetting that the administration wasn't in favor of gay marriage quite yet.)(Under the assumption that was a real screw-up rather than a stunt, but my impression was that it was real.)

At this point if Biden wanted to run for President in 2016 we would know. He doesn't (barring some catastrophic scenario, like Hillary dying). What combination of deals/personal decisions/involvement of Obama/calculation of likelihood of success led to this result I don't think we know, but the conclusion is dead clear that Biden is just not running in 2016.

I worry that she's going to be dealing with leaders from places where men aren't accustomed to dealing with women as leaders and those leaders will keep asking her if Bill is O.K. with something she's doing and that she'll eventually get so frustrated that she bombs the U.A.E. or our local plumbers union here.

He is the guy in position if she gets hit by a meteor, and while it's not likely that anything happens to her between now and 2016, it's not incredibly unlikely. So he could perfectly well be 'not running' but still keeping himself looking plausible in case she's somehow out of the picture.

237: George Will wrote an editorial talking about what a great liberal Sherrod Brown is, and how he's so much cooler than Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, but liberals are just too caught up in identity politics to see this. But I don't think Sherrod is stupid enough to take George Will seriously.

Accusing a politician of deliberately overshadowing competitors is accusing a politician of being effective.

So the question naturally follows: Why would anyone think that being effective makes someone a b-b-b-ad person? The gendered insult is particularly unfortunate in the context of baseless criticism, because it suggests an answer to that question.

I feel that she should declare, or firmly decline, but this prevarication on her part is getting in the way of other potential candidates raising money and so on.

But does anyone seriously think she's not going to run? For good or ill, the coyness is a firm tradition at this point*, and other potentials can interpret it. Or more to the point, if she formally declared, would that return any air to the room, or would it just make it worse? I think the real main issue is the shallow bench besides her.

* A holdover from when it was Not Done for candidates to openly say they wanted to be president? Or something arcane about campaign finance?

249: Or more to the point, if she formally declared, would that return any air to the room, or would it just make it worse?

I think the principal difference between my perspective on this and that of everyone else here who's voiced an opinion is that I'm not 100% sure she intends to run. I mean, I find it hard to believe that she won't, given her behavior -- looking for all the world as though she is indeed, sure as hell, going to run -- but on the other hand, I honestly would not be shocked out of my mind if she regretfully announced that she'd decided against it. She's getting up there in years; right around the time she retired as Sect'y of State, she was looking very tired, even haggard.

It's that possibility that has made me annoyed; it's that possibility that makes her current non-campaigning an air suck. If her answer is "No", she should say so. Feel free to explain that I'm nuts to even consider the possibility -- but it's probably not necessary.

No, it's occurred to me too. We've got viable former candidates, Gore & Kerry, whom we could rally round if we had to. Lots depends on what the Republicans come up with, and there isn't an overwhelming favorite there either.